Navigating the Zeitgeist: A Story of the Cold War, the New Left, Irish Republicanism, and International Communism
308 pp, $25 pbk, ISBN 978-1-58367-727-8
By Helena Sheehan
Reviewed by Emmet O’Connor
“Autobiographies are tricky things. The memoir can ground the writer in external events or situations and provide an objective rationale. The autobiography places oneself at the centre of the narrative and is an act of whopping self-regard that demands a weighty justification….Even Caesar wrote of his Gallic wars in the third person. In this first half of a proposed two-volume study, Professor Helena Sheehan addresses these problems at the outset. Her aim is to tell the story of the left from the heady days of the 1960s to the ‘fall of the wall’, but to go beyond memoir ‘for a work of intellectual, social, and political history within the narrative framework of autobiography’.”
Read the review at Dublin Review of Books
Comments are closed.